Liberal Shooter Planned Mass Murder

Will Floyd Corkins become the poster boy for gun control? He certainly deserves the honor. Corkins pled guilty today to firearms, terrorism and assault charges in Washington, D.C. Corkins shot and wounded one man in a terrorist attack last August, but he admitted in court that he had intended to kill as many as possible. He was carrying a loaded 9 mm handgun and had in his possession two additional loaded magazines and 50 loose rounds of ammunition. So the Democrats and their media outlets should be talking up Floyd Corkins, right?

Wrong. Because he carried out his attack on the Family Research Council’s Washington headquarters. Corkins is a left-winger who set out to murder FRC’s employees because he “didn’t like [their] politics,” specifically the fact that they oppose gay marriage. Corkins carried in his backpack, along with ammunition, 15 Chick Fil-A sandwiches in which he said he had intended to rub the faces of conservatives after he murdered them. It wasn’t just the FRC, either; Corkins had targeted three other conservative organizations whose staff he intended to murder after he was finished at the FRC.

And, to top it off, Corkins’s would-be killing spree was inspired, he has acknowledged, by intemperate left-wing political rhetoric. He got his list of conservatives to kill from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hate Map, where organizations that do nothing more “hateful” than arguing for conservative positions are demonized.

It was a close call: but for the actions of a heroic security guard, who subdued Corkins despite having been shot in the arm, the SPLC might have dozens of politically-inspired killings on its conscience. Well, maybe not. The SPLC has re-affirmed its view that opposing gay marriage makes an organization a “hate group,” and has refused to make any changes in the Hate Map that served as a blueprint for Floyd Corkins.

All in all, I don’t think we will be hearing a lot about Corkins from the Democrats. Still, his crime is a valuable reminder that the crazy talk we hear every day from liberals can be dangerous.

A footnote: we have written repeatedly about the silliness of the Democrats’ efforts to ban average-sized magazines. As we have noted, people carry spare magazines, pre-loaded, all the time. It takes less than two seconds to drop an empty magazine and insert a fresh one. That is what Corkins evidently had in mind. Even crazy people are smart enough to know that if you want to shoot lots of rounds, you simply load up several magazines.